Patricia Polacco’s “Gifts of the Heart” celebrates the nucleus that makes a family.

“Gifts of the Heart” tells of the final Christmas on the farm for Trisha and Richie, their mother and grandfather. They hate to leave it, but with their grandmother dead, the place is too full of memories for Grampa. And the family is a little strapped for cash. Selling the farm will help them.

Trisha and Richie are feeling sad when a newcomer shows up on the farmhouse threshold. It’s Kay Lamity, their new housekeeper. (But they didn’t have an old housekeeper! Anyway.)

She is full of wonderfully quirky phrases and has a winning way in the kitchen. After some hesitation, the kids embrace her, and confide that their favorite part of Christmas is the presents. Richie is thinking about a train model he saw in a downtown store window. Trisha is thinking about a sweet doll.

“All them toys ya see in them shop windas are one kind of gift…Maybe they ain’t the ones that count,” Kay Lamity tells them. She elaborates:
“Gifts that come straight from the heart, that’s the kind that’s kept forever!”
“What do you mean…from the heart?” Richie asks.
“A gift of the heart ain’t opened by pullin’ on a fancy bow or rippin’ pretty paper off a box. It’s about openin’ your heart…and givin’ what’s inside. That’s the greatest gift of all!”

Joyce Meskis, owner of the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, was honored May 8 by the Colorado Authors’ League. (Photo from The Denver Post archives)

The Colorado Authors’ League named its 2014 honorees on May 8, with awards going out in categories ranging from poetry to fiction to childrens books, magazine journalism to blogging.

Among those recognized were two women with decades in the literary world between them.

Joyce Meskis, owner of the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, was honored with the CAL Author Advocate Award. Among other things, she was cited for her support of local authors and championing First Amendment rights.

Lois Hayna, a 101-year-old Colorado Springs poet who didn’t devote herself fully to writing until she was in her 60s, won the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Meskis and Hayna were the inaugural winners of their awards. They were honored in an evening dinner at the Marriott Courtyard in Cherry Creek. Award-winning novelist Robert Greer of the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology, was the keynote speaker.

Geraldine Brooks, who has written such lauded works as the Pulitzer Prize-winning “March,” and “People of the Book,” which been published globally, shared some insights into the writing process when recently in Denver for The Denver Post’s Pen & Podium lecture at the University of Denver’s Newman Center.

Here’s a few things we learned. 1. Pay attention and ideas might pop up from unexpected sources.

Brooks was hiking in the park district of England when she came upon a sign marking a village as the home of the plague in 1665. She learned that the town, Eyam, quarantined itself to prevent the spread of the disease and built a book imagining the lives of the people who lived there, “Year of Wonder.”
The same was true when studying a map of Martha’s Vineyard, where she now lives with her husband and two sons. The map noted the island was the home of the first Native American graduate of Harvard. Brooks mused that she looked forward to maybe meeting him in the local library — until she read on and learned he graduated in the mid-1660s. That was what started her most recent novel, “Caleb’s Crossing.”

Nobody at school seems to see Brian, so he occupies himself with cartoons. When classmates shun a new boy, Brian creates a drawing for him that helps get Brian into the picture as well.

Trudy Ludwig’s “The Invisible Boy” is a story whose dilemma nearly everyone will recognize. Anyone who’s stood off to the side at a party, or silently watched conversations bubble at a table, or been overlooked when teams were chosen knows what it’s like to feel invisible.

In her story, young Brian, a quiet boy who literally is black and white in a colorful world (nice touch by illustrator Patrice Barton), looks on while classmates call attention to themselves. When kids divvy up for recess kickball, Brian stands on the sidelines, “waiting and hoping,” but remains unchosen.

At lunch, the other kids compare notes on the birthday party that everyone (except for Brian) enjoyed over the weekend. Because he wasn’t invited. To console himself, he calls on his imagination to fill empty pages with bright drawings of monsters, flying saucers, pirates and superheroes.

Then a new boy comes to class. The other kids size him up, but laugh at him when he pulls out a bowl of bulgogi for lunch.

Siblings Sidney and Stella do everything together — feed the ducks, play games, read, share a room (that’s sternly divided with a dotted white line) — with one exception. They don’t share.

Imagine! Two small children who don’t share! Well, suspend disbelief. So Stella and Simon are arguing over a ball — a very bouncy ball that is also so hard that it’s capable of shattering the moon (but not, for some reason, whatever it touches in their house). And as they argue, they grapple with the ball until it slips loose and bounces all the way to the (apparently fragile) moon, and the “moon broke into a million pieces.”

“The Highest Number in the World” explains why 9 is a revered number in the world of hockey.

“The Highest Number in the World” — and no, that isn’t a reference to Colorado’s newly-legalized recreational marijuana — is actually a picture book about a superstitious hockey player.

Young Gabe (short for Gabriella) utterly devotes her life to hockey. She’s invented a cool move that her teammates call “The Gabe,” and she’s proud of her lucky jersey with “22” on the back, a duplicate of the red and white Team Canada jersey worn by Olympian Hayley Wickenheiser. She’s counting on wearing number 22 when she makes the team, but then she learns that 20 is the team’s highest number.

Gabe’s heart breaks when she’s handed a jersey with 9 on the back. She detests her assigned number, and threatens to quit the team.

“The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond” starts with Violet on her last day of elementary school, fretting about the unpromising summer looming in front of her. Her best friend is going to Greece. Her big sister, Daisy, is wrapped up in her boyfriend.

But Violet’s mom promised that she could have a kitten, so maybe life won’t be completely dull in Moon Lake, the vanilla bedroom community where she lives in Washington state.

Moon Lake is vanilla in more ways than one. Violet is the one of the only people of color in her community. Her father was African-American, so she is “brown haired, brown eyed, brown skinned, biracial.” She “sometimes feels like a single fallen brown leaf atop a blanket of fresh snow. Alone.” She doesn’t like the question in people’s eyes when they see her with her white mother, grandparents and sister.

Billed as the biggest collection of time travel stories ever, “The Time Traveler’s Almanac” hits bookshelves March 18.

It’s easy to believe publishing house Tor when it claims “The Time Traveler’s Almanac” is the largest and most definitive collection of time-traveling stories ever assembled.

The galley for the book, which arrived in my mailbox last week in a bulbous package more suitable for a pot roast than a work of fiction, is nearly 950 pages of dense, clever, harrowing, funny, insane, brilliant stories from many of the world’s best sci-fi and spec fiction writers.

From late titans to worthy up-and-comers, the book collects more than 70 stories about the liquidity of our perceptual condition from writers Douglas Adams, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, George R.R. Martin, William Gibson, Richard Matheson, H.G. Wells and dozens more. Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, the “Almanac” has already earned praise in the U.K. and will be released in the States on March 18.

“So where can I get one?” you ask while you slip on your time-goggles and reflective silver jumpsuit and contemplate the maddening nature of time’s fickle path.

In this charmingly silly story, a boy tries to figure out why his cat, normally playful, agile and lithe, has morphed into a plump feline who struggles to get through the cat door, wolfs down her food, can’t run fast enough to catch a mouse, and gets stuck when she heaves herself up a tree.

“That cannot be my cat,” the boy tells himself, as readers look at page after page of an increasingly uncomfortable, sluggish kitty.

Enterprising Max figures out how to make the perfect birthday cake for his mom — and it’s kosher!

“Max Makes A Cake” follows a small boy’s adventures in the kitchen. It’s his mother’s birthday and Passover, so her surprise cake has to be kosher.

Max and his father have a special box of kosher cake mix that’s perfect. But Max also has a little sister, Trudy, so little “she couldn’t even talk yet,” which means that even though she’s the youngest child in the family, it’s still up to Max to ask the Four Questions for Passover. This is fine with Max; he knows the questions in Hebrew and in English.

But what isn’t fine is Trudy’s reluctance to go down for her nap when Max and his father need to fix the birthday cake. Daddy’s attention goes to Trudy first, leaving Max to stew in the kitchen. Inspiration strikes when he realizes they forgot to buy frosting, and he mixes cream cheese and jam for a tasty substitute.